(sciam.com) Farmer Danny Anderson, 53, must have thought he had things under control after using a shovel to hack the head off a snake that had slithered onto his farm in central Washington State. He couldn’t possibly have predicted what happened next: The severed head did a “backflip almost” and bit his finger, the AP reports, sending Anderson to the hospital as his tongue swelled from venom. Actually, maybe he could have predicted this bizarre plot twist from straight out of Snakes on a Plane 2. At least five other men have received snakebites on their fingers from dead or decapitated snakes, according to a 1999 New England Journal of Medicine paper. The phenomenon may go even further back. As noted in the December 1999 SciAm, poet Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote in an 1820 letter to his wife Mary that “vipers kill, though dead.” In fact, “decapitated snake heads are dangerous for between 20 and 60 minutes after removal from the body of the snake,” Jeffrey Suchard of the Good Samaritan Regional Medical Center in Phoenix told SciAm’s own Steve Mirsky earlier that year. So remember: wait an hour before handling a dead snake. (source)
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